


Make and Mend

by kindkit



Category: Tintin
Genre: Age Difference, Knitting, M/M, Quadruple Drabble, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-02
Updated: 2011-10-02
Packaged: 2017-10-24 06:27:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 400
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/260151
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kindkit/pseuds/kindkit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Haddock makes a gift.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Make and Mend

**Author's Note:**

> This is related to [Solo Ascent](http://archiveofourown.org/works/259424), wherein Tintin's blue sweater is a gift from Haddock. It also owes a lot to my Tintin-related discussions with Halotolerant; Haddock having made the sweater himself was her idea.

Every landsman knows what sailors get up to on long hauls: drinking, fighting, whoring in port and buggery at sea.

True enough, but it leaves a lot out. Sailors make things: they whittle, learn the guitar and write songs, do fancy knotwork. And every sailor Haddock's known could knit and sew, because if your trousers rip in mid-Pacific or your warmest sweater gets covered in engine oil on the way to Greenland, you can't exactly go running to your mother.

If he's got a lot of time on his hands--if he's not inclined to whoring and has (nearly) always had the sense not to bugger men under his command, if he's big enough that his opponents run rather than fight, if he can't be drunk all the time, much as he wants to--then your sailor can get good at making things. Get to like it.

Which is why Haddock sits here in his flat, far from the sea, with the needles in his hands and a half-finished sweater in his lap. He's got the radio on (there's a concert, almost free of German propaganda for once) and a good glass of black-market whisky at his side. A good moderate glass that even Tintin couldn't disapprove of.

He holds his work up to the light, checking the last few rows for evenness and dropped stitches. Not bad. He's getting the trick of this lightweight yarn that makes his fingers clumsy; if he used the heavy wool he's accustomed to, there'd be more sweater than boy. His stitches are smooth, correct; no need to unravel any of tonight's work. At first he made Penelope's progress, unravelling everything, because a few mistakes are all right in something you'll wear on deck but not in a gift.

No, it's turning out well. Soft as anything, too. Haddock strokes it carefully, as though it were alive, as though it could feel his touch.

He likes the color of it against his own sleeve. Two blues, morning and evening.

He strokes it one more time, then takes up his needles. He's got a lot of work to do before it's finished. No matter, there's time enough. This is the longest haul of his life, this voyage into seas he's never known and no one can chart for him, but he thinks that one distant incalculable day, he'll sight land and he will come home.


End file.
